President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to pardon the violent criminals who attacked the United States Capitol on his behalf on January 6th, 2021, and Bloomberg reports that this is causing real concern among many legal experts about the safety of various people involved in their trials.
Louis Manzo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped prosecute members of the Oath Keepers militia, tells Bloomberg that he is worried about pardoned MAGA rioters posing what Bloomberg describes as "immediate fears for safety" of judges, lawyers, and witnesses who put them behind bars.
“For all of the work that they’ve put into the cases, for it to all be pardoned will definitely be a shock to the system,” said Manzo.
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Mary McCord, who leads the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown University Law Center, similarly tells Bloomberg that a mass pardon of convicted MAGA rioters would be a "dramatic blow" to the rule of law.
This would be the case even if Trump limited his pardons to only to rioters who were convicted of nonviolent offenses, as they may actually have committed acts of violence but agreed to plead to lesser charges in exchange for cooperating with other investigations.